The Shape of Code

The Source code chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been reworked (draft pdf).

When writing the first version of this chapter, I was not certain whether source code was a topic warranting a chapter to itself, in an evidence-based software engineering book. Now I am certain. Source code is the primary product delivery, for a software system, and it is takes up much of the available cognitive effort.

What are the desirable characteristics that source code should have, to minimise production costs per unit of functionality? This is what an evidence-based chapter on source code is all about.

The release of this chapter completes my second pass over the material. Readers will notice the text still contains ... and ?‘s. The third pass will either delete these, or say something interesting (I suspect mostly the former, because of lack of data).

Talking of data, February has been a bumper month for data (apologies if you responded to my email asking for data, and it has not appeared in this release; a higher than average number of people have replied with data).

The plan is to spend a few months getting a beta release ready. Have the beta release run over the summer, with the book in the shops for Christmas.

I’m looking at getting a few hundred printed, for those wanting paper.

The only publisher that did not mind me making the pdf freely available was MIT Press. Unfortunately one of the reviewers was foaming at the mouth about the things I had to say about software engineering researcher (it did not help that I had written a blog post containing a less than glowing commentary on academic researchers, the week of the review {mid-2017}); the second reviewer was mildly against, and the third recommended it.

If any readers knows the editors at MIT Press, do suggest they have another look at the book. I would rather a real publisher make paper available.

Next, getting the ‘statistics for software engineers’ second half of the book ready for a beta release.